Scientists explain how smartphones are hurting your relationships

Have you ever been caught "pphubbing"? To keep you up with the social and tech lingo, pphubbing means "partner phone snubbing," which we are all guilty of some time or another when we get distracted by what's happening on our device and ignore our significant other. Scientists from Baylor University recently conducted a study that revealed how the weirdly spelled phenomenon is literally ruining relationships.

The researchers developed a pphubbing scale to let the participants rate how their partners' phones come between them on a daily base, from a non-intrusive presence to an utter state of screen distraction. A staggering 46.3 percent of the people studied revealed that their significant other pphub them, or that at least they perceive they are being pphubbed, therefore casting a negative influence on the relationship, as professor James Roberts commented:

What we discovered was that when someone perceived that their partner phubbed them, this created conflict and led to lower levels of reported relationship satisfaction. These lower levels of relationship satisfaction, in turn, led to lower levels of life satisfaction and, ultimately, higher levels of depression.